Saturday, December 17, 2022

Leaders have a Voice: Franklin Graham & Alveda King

 

Leaders have a Voice: Franklin Graham & Alveda King

Franklin Graham

The Antidote to Fear

“Believers in our Risen Lord and Savior to stand firm in their faith and bear strong and godly witness to a panicked world” (Graham).

-Inflation: cost of groceries, gas, and heating bills

-Violence: brazen daylight brutal attacks, shootings, looters, and stealing. Evil acts have made people feel unsafe and helpless

-Government: turning our country into a socialist welfare state

“God recognizes that fear does rise in the believer’s heart on occasion. The Lord knows our tendency to worry and fret, and He also tells us what to do about our worries” (Graham).

Psalm 56: 3-4 “when I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh (or any circumstance in life) do to me?”

We can look confidently to all-knowing, all-powerful, Almighty God in simple trust and faith when the turbulent waves of anxiety that sweep through our so easily frightened culture are raging.

Ecclesiastes 12:13 “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”

R. Albert Mohler Jr. (Pres. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary & Boyce College)

Duty Calls: The Mandate for Christian Citizens

“Christians in the United States hold dual citizenship. The Apostle Paul spoke to all Christians that we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom. Our heavenly citizenship is the most important possession we have secured by Jesus Christ our Savior” (Mohler).

No Earthly citizenship compares to eternal citizenship in Heaven. Paul even claimed his Roman citizenship when he was unjustly arrested Paul for preaching the Gospel in Jerusalem. “I am a citizen by birth” Paul announced (Acts 22:28).

Like Paul, Christians are American citizens who have dual citizenship. Augustine, one of the fathers of the ancient church, taught his flock to understand that there are two cities that demand our attention and allegiance. The City of God and the City of Man.

-City on Earth: the drive is for the love of humanity itself

 -City of God: the passion is for the love of God

“He was trying to help Christians be faithful in our earthly citizenship, even as we wait for Heaven” (Mohler).

Christians are called to be salt and light in a darkening culture, and faithfulness calls out our deepest convictions and our active discipleship:

Our Voice

1. Christian citizens must exercise the power f our voices and speak truth about the issues of our day.

2. The left chants “silence is violence,” but Christians must know that silence is unfaithfulness.

3. We are called to tell the truth, even when it costs us.

4. Speak on behalf of the unborn; against the destruction of precious human lives in the womb.

5. Speak out for marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

6. Speak out for the sanctity of the family as the most essential unit of human civilization.

7. Speak for righteousness and goodness and contend for laws that are just for policies that uphold what is right.

8. The Christian citizen must be ready to speak, to make arguments, to engage in conversations and to make our convictions known.

-Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time to speak and when it is right to be silent.

-The prophet Ezekiel tells us that a failure to speak when danger approaches is a horrible sin. The Watchman on the Wall is to make the warning clear.

9. Christian citizens must be ready to speak, to make arguments, to engage in conversations and to make our convictions known.

Our Vote

1. American constitutional system is based upon the right and responsibility of citizens to vote.

2. Participate in elections and fulfill the citizen’s duty to choose the best candidates and make the right choices, vote by vote.

3. Voting is an enormous act of stewardship, so all elections are important from national elections to those offices such as the local school board.

Our Victory

“Politics Is not for the faint of heart, and Christians know the political fray can be tumultuous. Furthermore, we do not win every battle or election. But we stay involved, engaged and energetic, knowing that we must work for what is right until Jesus comes. We will know both victory and setbacks in the City of Man, but only victory in the City of God. Every vote count, every election matters, and every Christian citizen is called to be faithful. We have work to do, and DUTY CALLS” (Mohler).

“Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them” (Brene’ Brown).

 

 

 

Alveda King

The Gospel’s Answer to Racism

Critical Race Theory: Seven Hard Truths

1. America is about individual equality, not group equity

-The idea behind CRT is that America is just groups, defined by skin color. They do not see America as individuals with separate souls, goals, dreams, schemes, skills, hopes, and God-given attributes.

-As a self-governing people, we have a constitution that recognizes our individuality, gives us each the same rights under law. Our differences give us separate paths to success, defined by free will. No group equity is written in the Constitution.

2. Equal opportunity is not an equal outcome. The Constitution gives all Americans an equal shot: education, employment, property ownership, returns, and resilience. Equal protection means the right to rise or fall, to succeed or fail= equal under the law

-CRT concentrates power to equalize outcomes, regardless of who earned what. Hard work and trust in the individual are gone.

3. CRT is itself racist. CRT not only assigns all life grievances by one race to another. Merit based achievement is rejected in favor of reverse racism. Easier to hate and blame than love and support.

-Teaches the assumption that we are not equal in God’s eyes or the eyes of the law, and never can be in each other’s eyes. Teaches children resentment, blame, and hopelessness. This kills the American Dream.

4. CRT denies upward mobility. It denies that hard wok and equal protection succeed. Upward mobility is the gaping hole in Marx’s bucket, draining it of power.

-To believe in CRT, you must believe your skin color defines your ability to succeed.

5. CRT immorally pushes intergenerational guilt. It is a fraud because the only way to justify putting one race down for another and openly teaching resentments is to pin the past on the present.

-Intentional guilt infliction of intergenerational guilt, making successors responsible for ancestors, is fundamentally immoral.

-Morality centers on individual accountability

-Individual sovereignty under natural, constitutional, and statute law; every life is sacred and belongs to itself.

-debt slavery and peonage and CRT are concepts that builds resentment is immoral

Ezekiel 18:20 “The child shall not share the guilt of the parent.”

6. CRT empowers elites to persecute: Marxist countries uses racial, ethnic, religious, or economic group to blame for society’s ills (elite push mass persecution)

7. CRT ignores data. America The biggest lie is that America is racist.

-America attracts more minorities than any country in the world.

-By wealth, Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans account for 25% of America’s Millionaires

-American dream is upward mobility through Capitalism-work hard and you will be successful

“CRT is Marxism, pushing resentment, blame, guilt, fear, silence, and compliance. Do not buy it. Americans cleave by values, not skin color. Critical race theory is junk--A disgrace.” Robert B. Charles

The Problem with the 1619 Project

“Together with critical race theory, wokeness, and cancel culture, parents and patriots alike will have to monitor their local school curricula carefully.” Jeff Szymanski

Claim: August 1619 a ship arrived in coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.

Written: summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd

Problems:

1. “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.” And “Some of the colonists fought to preserve slavery.”

2. History: American Revolution originated as a rallying cry of “no taxation without representation” as Great Britain levied taxes on colonists in America without any input (Tax on Tea)

3. America’s founding takes on a dark view where blacks forever struggle for rights that will never be achieved. “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of the country.” (Hannah-Jones).

4. Leads to political paralysis as there is nothing, we can do to get out of it as you can’t alter DNA.

-America is so inherently racist to its core that people cannot grow or change over time.

-Education itself would be useless as society fated to be racist forever.

Promotes:

-Curriculum: Hannah-Jones claim that she discovered a fundamental truth about American History that has eluded the historical profession: That the central defining feature of American history and culture is racism

-Redefines America’s history as a struggle between ‘oppressors (white people)’ and the ‘oppressed (everybody else)’

-Marxism’s reduction of human history: majority-white societies are “systemically” or “structurally racist.”

-used to divide American people based on color of their skin that creates dysfunction, hate, and strife between white Americans and black Americans which is opposite of Dr. Martin Luther’s teaching of not being judged by the color of your skin but content of your character.

Negates:

-Pilgrims landed in the Mayflower in 1620 in Massachusetts

-1776 Traditional date of the Declaration of Independence is our National Holiday on July 4th

“A racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.” Senator Tom Cotton

Affecting Today:

HR 1 (S1) “For the People Act” applies racially discriminatory Jim Crow descriptions of state election reform and integrity laws. (ID at the polls is discriminatory as marginalized people of color don’t have access to get an ID to vote)

-used in the disastrous “open border” policy which is an egregious assault on our nation’s sovereignty and the safety of Americans.

-used to increate punitive tax increases that spawned inflation, high interest rates, business closures, and job losses leading to dependency on the federal government welfare (tenant of national socialism)

Voting Rights Act: Give the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division the authority to march into any election to pick political and economic winners and losers.

HR 5 “Equality Act” intended to sow division between sexual identity and biological sex issues that arise in the broad range of community, educational, religious, and sports and recreational circumstance.

HR 842 “Protecting the Right to Organize Act” intended to increase Democrat party control by promoting labor union organization and power in businesses also known as “Workers of the World, Unite!” right out of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto.

Examples: Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Cancel Culture, and Critical Race Theory